Kang Youwei, the development of the political space of the West and the concept of freedom (treatise “An Essay on National Salvation through Material Upbuilding”)

Abstract

The article examines the political doctrine of Kang Youwei (1858–1927), as set out in his treatise Wu zhi jiu guo lun (“An Essay on National Salvation through Material Upbuilding”), written in Canada in 1905 and published in 1908. While in exile after 1899 and declaring himself a modern-day Confucius, Kang Youwei carefully studied the history of the West and the political systems of contemporary European countries and the United States. The main content of the treatise is a search for the source of the power of Western imperialist powers in order to apply this experience to China. Kang Youwei came to the conclusion that Western countries “became powerful thanks to phenomenal progress in science and technology; China must achieve the same level of progress in order to survive and prosper.” There are two main reasons for the West’s superiority over China: national science and the “doctrine of the material.” By “material” Kang Youwei meant modern industrial technologies and the social realities of a globalizing world. At the center of Kang Youwei’s concept is the idea of freedom, which, like all others, he considered historically relative and dependent on the political system of the “current century.” The Chinese thinker claimed that the liberal concept of freedom imposed by Western imperialists is a product of the “feudal-slave system in Europe,” while the Chinese social system provides the vast majority of the population with basic rights and freedoms that are not suppressed by the state. The Western concept of freedom is legal, not philosophical and ideological, and contradicts human nature as interpreted by Chinese philosophical teachings. Speaking about the French Revolution, Kang Youwei emphasized that it liberated the people from oppression by the monarch but did not contribute to the ethical development of ordinary people. In China, the first thinker to raise the issue of social freedoms was Confucius, who also formulated the golden rule of morality. However, the availability of rights and freedoms is limited by the era of social development: Confucius lived in the Era of Chaos, and his teaching is adapted to its realities, determined by the flow of Tao. The Japanese adaptation of the Western interpretation of freedom during the Meiji Revolution was a great mistake of Japanese reformers and may be repeated in China, turning the country onto a path of development not dictated by the nature of Chinese society.